


Those Left Behind

by Smaragdina



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-28
Updated: 2012-03-28
Packaged: 2017-11-02 15:03:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/370292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smaragdina/pseuds/Smaragdina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Amidst the shrine to Tuchanka’s true mother they find remnants of old technology, something dating from far before the Ending Cycle. The krogan were not thought to be advanced enough to possess such a thing. It is something to puzzle over, the subject of papers, of doctorate theses." Far in the future, scholars and scientists find the planets inhabited by those left behind when the Mass Relays exploded, and discover how legends have changed over time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Those Left Behind

There are things they had not accounted for.

They set watches on the stars at night, mothers and sisters scanning the skies of the tell-tale flicker of mass effect fields shifting into the visible spectrum, of ships spiraling home. Broken, flaming, but still flying. Home. They planned for soldiers returned, soldiers reunited with the soil, the distribution of blood-stained dog tags, the lists of the dead and the brighter lists of the living.

Or they had planned for Reapers and warning sirens, for poison pills and nuclear winters as the end of everything unfurled in the stars.

They had not planned for the _black,_ the nothing in the night sky where the relays used to sit, the long generations upon generations of waiting and waiting and waiting.

They had not planned for the passage of time.

*****

The archeologists who first set foot upon Tuchanka are startled to find so much alive. So much green. It is remarkable that the krogan survived this long, the leading scholars say – remarkable that they did so _much,_ lifted so many walls, planted so many gardens, before their warlike nature (it _had_ to be their warlike nature) forced them into the tombs that dot the landscape. They open wide beneath the researchers’ feet in the desert, swallow them like mouths.

The teams move through slowly, documenting each corpse, taking notes. Females, all, or near enough. It is only half as expected. The fate of the males is known but there should be more juveniles, at least, signs of a younger generation, signs that the species ever had _hope._

Amidst the shrine to Tuchanka’s true mother they find remnants of old technology, something dating from far before the Ending Cycle. The krogan were not thought to be advanced enough to possess such a thing. It is something to puzzle over, the subject of papers, of doctorate theses. There is a small political coup over the ownership of such technology, but in the end it is a moot point: all further salvage teams are eaten alive.

It is no great surprise.

The badly-battered data logs tell them that Tuchanka’s mother ate a god, long ago. They tell her that the krogan women saw her as a god in truth, just before the end, that husbandless woman mantled themselves like the men they could not find and went out to the desert to greet her. They could not, the logs say, have ever wished for a worthier death.

Legends of another being identified as the mother of Tuchanka belong to so brief a period of history as to be deemed insignificant.

In the wasteland of what was once called the Kelphic Valley the archeologists find an enigma: a space of cleared ground. Cut stones indicate that it was meant to be a statue. An ancient omni-tool nearby shows it was to be an image of the Shepherd, but this (scholars insist) makes no sense, must be mere coincidence. The Shepherd never made it this far into the dark of the galaxy and such knowledge of her is impossible. The graffiti around the to-be base of the statue speaks of hate and betrayal, names a creature who slaughtered a million unborn babies in the blink of her eye, who lied.

It could not be the Shepherd.

The image, all agree, is excellent. She is standing battle-ready, rifle in hand, hair blowing in a nonexistent wind. There are several well-received papers written about her face: it is stylized, scars in sharp relief. Her expression is oddly maternal. It is a crime that the statue was never finished.

Behind her rears the true mother of Tuchanka, coils rising high, mouth open behind the Shepard in a way that it suggests a crown.

It is taken as evidence of yet another people that worshipped her as a god.

*****

The indigenous peoples of the far-off planet of Rannoch wear hoods over their heads and speak, once they learn the anthropologists’ language, in accents that roll and twist and trill. They are in possession of far more old technology than they ever have right to and this is the start of many wars, for the men who follow the initial anthropologists are not so kind.

They capture a few of the natives’ holy objects in such wars, smuggle them offworld and pry them open. The relics are in the shape of the natives and yet _not quite,_ obviously the platforms of an advanced and long-dead model of VI. The complexity of circuitry is greater than anything seen to date. It cannot be reproduced. A team of scientists is given exorbitant funding for a project to make a backwards-compatible platform and restart just one of the many thousand programs in each relic. The project is expected to be completed in one or two generations.

The media takes to calling them the Old Machines. The natives rebel against such a name, speaking of myths that came from the sky. Their legends bear a curious similarity to the things the Shepherd warns of.

It is not, the natives explain (again, and again, to their exasperation) that the relics _were_ the Old Machines. The Old Machines were a monster. The relics were their savior. To confuse the names now would be an insult, blasphemous, the greatest kind of heresy. If you wish to learn about the Old Machines, they say, they used to have a wreck of one; but the relics destroyed it before they became nonfunctional, as the men who went near it turned blue-eyed and mad.

It is simply another way that the ancient VIs saved them.

 “They uploaded themselves into fewer and fewer platforms,” says a native historian. His hood is violet. It is the color of protection and salvation in their culture, though the origins are muddled. “Time and the desert destroyed them, slowly, and we did not have the resources to repair them or make new ones. Their numbers dwindled. It made them greater. Eventually they ran out of room and began to cull programs. It made them lesser. They died for us. We left them where they lay.”

It is a beautiful story, and the thread of _they died for us_ resonates with the Shepherd. It might even be true.

The historian explains many things the VIs did for them, miracles of peace and home and healing the sick. Hesitantly, he even allows offworlders into the First House. It is a simple dwelling, kept preserved and pristine by a climate dome of age immemorial. Inside, there is not much. A bed. A table. Other furniture that has never been used. Wires and bits of ancient tech that were never finished, can never be turned on. A window with a view that is nothing special and that many consider to be beautiful, incomparable, taking in stone and sun and sky.

It is the holiest place on Rannoch’s soil.

*****

The people of Palaven open fire at the first ships that touch down on their soil. And again on the second, and the third and fourth. The fifth party is decimated before the frantic signals for _peace_ are understood, and even then the bird-people take their weapons and hold them hostage until translators can be flown in.

“We are sorry,” says the leader of the war party. Her face is painted in bars of blue; it is learned, eventually, that this is traditional. “Our people are not quick to trust.”

The histories that come forward are shocking. Nothing in the record suggests that krogan ever set foot on the ash-rich soil of this world, that krogan ever fought and died here as they did on Earth so long ago. They starved, the legends say, but a starving krogan is still a horrifying thing. The white-painted diplomat who explains the story to a circle of cameras pulls out a map of Palaven to illustrate, points a clawed hand at the ancient lines of war, battlefronts that date back a thousands of years.

“And the craters?” asks a reporter, touching the map as well. The scars that mar the planet’s surface, the marks of burned cities that are now no more than piles of ash. The press crowds in, eagerly. “Did the krogan do that?”

“No,” says the diplomat. “That came from the sky.”

*****

The garden world of Sur’kesh is full of wild beasts. Mutated. Monstrous. Researchers are consigned to circling the planet in low orbit, identifying points of interest valuable enough to risk sending a strike team with heavy weapons. They clear the jungle and a good number of the beasts before they expire, and the scientists are able to extract a fair amount of data, rip research terminals from the walls and pluck omni-tools from where the dead lay scattered on the floor. It sparks a technological renaissance, and several more controlled strikes are made in the following years.

A team of geneticists analyze the beasts that prowl the forests and link them to several ancient species, yahg and varren and others. They have evolved far past their forbearers and there is evidence of tampering with their genetic code even before then, modifications that made them smarter and faster and stronger. It is hypothesized that the native people of Sur’kesh were killed by their own experiments.

It is hypothesized that Sur’kesh is far more dangerous than Tuchanka.

*****

There are other planets, of course. A world covered almost entirely by water, seas turned toxic with so much ash, artifacts of incalculable age buried in the depths. A world with broken towers that the records describe as a beacon of hope but which houses nary a living soul. A world where the art shows men with four eyes and where the streets are empty even of corpses.

One by one, the worlds in the legend of the Shepherd are discovered, explored, accounted for. Some bring new species of men, new technology and histories, new languages and ways of war. Some, like Tuchanka and Thessia, like Kahje and Sur’kesh and Khar’shan, bring only silence.

They are all brought back into the fold.

The thing they had _not_ accounted for (scholars all agree) is the Shepherd. They find her legend on every planet where men still speak, on nearly every planet that men do _not_ (encoded in data spools, blurred and beautiful in ancient vids). It is unprecedented. Nothing had ever suggested that she had ever travelled so far, done so much.

If she had done so much, some say, she truly is a god.

If she is a god (other say, heretical and bitter, across many planets and many peoples), she should not have caused so much death.

“We looked to the sky to see our soldiers coming home,” says the historian on Rannoch. It is the same story told on Palaven, on so many others. “We despaired when we saw only silence.”

It is a story that sounds strange on Earth, when the tale is that of _too many_ people crowded in one home, of lack instead of emptiness. It is the same story turned on its head. The scholars turn to the legends of the Shepherd, the woman who survives in half-destroyed data capsules found all across the sky. She is bold and beautiful and deadly, that much is certain; she speaks of things that make no sense, knows things that she should not, has travelled farther into the dark than any other and left ways for men to follow in her footsteps.

It has been hypothesized that she is the savior of them all.

They begin to revise.


End file.
